Since Forbes hired me in 1995 to write a legal column, I’ve taken advantage of the great freedom the magazine grants its staff, to pursue stories about everything from books to billionaires. I’ve chased South Africa’s first black billionaire through a Cape Town shopping mall while admirers flocked around him, climbed inside the hidden chamber in the home of an antiquarian arms and armor dealer atop San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill, and sipped Chateau Latour with one of Picasso’s grandsons in the Venice art museum of French tycoon François Pinault. I’ve edited the magazine’s Lifestyle section and opinion pieces by the likes of John Bogle and Gordon Bethune. As deputy leadership editor, these days I mostly write about careers and corporate social responsibility. I got my job at Forbes through a brilliant libertarian economist, Susan Lee, whom I used to put on television at MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. Before that I covered law and lawyers for journalistic stickler, harsh taskmaster and the best teacher a young reporter could have had, Steven Brill.

The Least Stressful Jobs Of 2013

University professors have a lot less stress than most of us. Update: Well maybe not, see ADDENDUM below. Unless they teach summer school, they are off between May and September and they enjoy long breaks during the school year, including a month over Christmas and New Year’s and another chunk of time in the spring. Even when school is in session they don’t spend too many hours in the classroom. For tenure-track professors, there is some pressure to publish books and articles, but deadlines are few. Working conditions tend to be cozy and civilized and there are minimal travel demands, except perhaps a non-mandatory conference or two. As for compensation, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median salary for professors is $62,000, not a huge amount of money but enough to live on, especially in a university town.

Another boon for professors: Universities are expected to add 305,700 adjunct and tenure-track professors by 2020, according to the BLS. All of those attributes land university professor in the number one slot on Careercast.com’s list of the least stressful jobs of 2013. The ranking comes from an annual best and worst jobs list that began in 1995 under the auspices of the Wall Street Journal. In 2009 the Journal dropped the ranking, which then moved over to CareerCast.com, a career and job listing website based in Carlsbad, Calif. The best and worst jobs listing, which ranks 200 jobs according to more than 100 criteria, comes out in April. This is the third year CareerCast has released a list of least and most stressful jobs, derived from its best and worst lists.

To gauge which jobs are the least stressful, CareerCast considered the 200 professions in its database and focused on 11 different job demands that it deemed likely to provoke stress, including travel, growth potential, competitiveness, physical demands, hazards, environmental conditions and risk to one’s own life or to others’.

According to Tony Lee, CareerCast’s publisher, the least stressful jobs have one thing in common: autonomy. “These jobs tend not to have someone standing over their shoulder putting pressure on them to get things done,” he says. University professors answer to themselves, he points out. “They are basically kings of their own fiefdoms.” The same is true for the other jobs on the least stressful list, including seamstress/tailor, which ranks second. “In these jobs, you’re doing something for which you are highly qualified and you’re the expert in how to get things done,” he adds. That’s the case for medical records and medical laboratory technicians, ranked numbers three and five on the list. Those jobs must be done with precision. The people who do them tend to work on their own, without much supervision. The same goes for jewelers, number four on the list, audiologists, dieticians and hair stylists.

The other thing most of the least stressful jobs have in common: At the end of the day, people in these professions can leave their work behind, and their hours tend to be the traditional nine to five.

None of the salaries for these professions top $100,000 and some are quite low, like seamstress/tailor with a median salary of just $26,000 and hair stylist, at $22,500, according to BLS numbers. But compensation was just one of the things CareerCast measured.

Though hair stylists make the lowest salary on the list, they are among the happiest, says Lee. Their colleagues and clients tend to become friends and they get lots of positive feedback and thanks for their work. “With a lot of these jobs, you’re getting warm fuzzies as you work,” he notes.

***ADDENDUM***

Since writing the above piece I have received more than 150 comments, many of them outraged, from professors who say their jobs are terribly stressful. While I characterize their lives as full of unrestricted time, few deadlines and frequent, extended breaks, the commenters insist that most professors work upwards of 60 hours a week preparing lectures, correcting papers and doing research for required publications in journals and books. Most everyone says they never take the summer off, barely get a single day’s break for Christmas or New Year’s and work almost every night into the wee hours.

Many of the comments are detailed, with time breakdowns laying out exactly how many hours the writers spend doing their jobs. One commenter, Jonathan Reynolds, sent me an itemized list of tasks he’d performed since Dec. 19 which included writing a 12,600-word book chapter and a 1,000-word book review, peer reviewing a manuscript for an editor, reviewing manuscripts for a professional journal and one for Oxford University Press. He also worked on an annotated bibliography and helped a struggling student. I agree that doesn’t sound like a relaxing schedule.

A commenter named Gwen Schug sent along a link to a well-written piece responding to the study I cited, detailing the hours it takes to do every aspect of a professor’s job, including the three hours preparation required per lecture, the fact that most professors have up to 55 advisees, each of whom requires at least an hour per semester, and grading, which can take a half hour per assignment. The piece also says professors are expected to attend 2-4 conferences a year, and points out that universities rarely pay the full expense.

I appreciate all of the comments and encourage you to read them. My intention here was to relay an intriguing list put together by a career and job listing site, CareerCast, that surveyed data on 200 jobs and drew up a list of professions it deemed least stressful, according to metrics I describe above, which are weighted toward categories like physical demands, environmental conditions and risking one’s life. CareerCast didn’t measure things like hours worked and the stresses that come from trying to get papers published in a competitive environment or writing grants to fund research.

I think there is value in CareerCast’s list, but I also welcome the observation that my characterization of a professor’s duties failed to include the stress brought on by long hours and the pressure to publish scholarly work. Though I happen to know a tenured professor who enjoys several breaks during the year and takes a several-week vacation over the summer, I didn’t set out to report exhaustively on the hours professors work. Unquestionably, the number varies greatly and is often high.

All of that said, to me the most striking thing about the comments I received is the fact that so many professors write that while they find their jobs stressful, they are deeply satisfied and happy in their work. This comment from David Perry is typical: “I love my job. It’s definitely deeply rewarding. But the stresses are intense and the workload never ending.”

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Comments

This is an intellectually lazy, badly-argued piece, and is seriously misleading in its claim that University Professors are ‘off’ over the summer. The author should seek a definition of ‘research’ and ask themselves how it is expected to happen during the parameters they believe academic work takes place in (9-5? get real…). They should also familiarize themselves with the intensive competition which academics at all levels, but particularly junior, face in order to gain employment and then tenure. No serious academic spends May-September ‘off’. They spend the period (which in my institution is named the ‘research term’) in intensive study and writing, because without significant publication records they are unable to advance. And the implication of the final sentence of the paragraph is that university cities have moderately priced housing stock: another inaccurate assumption. As I would ask my students: where is your evidence for any of this?

What universe are these people living in? Yes, there are many wonderful things about being a professor, not the least of which is not having a boss once you have tenure, but “no stress” isn’t one of them. I teach in the Psychology and Education dept. at Mount Holyoke College. For most of us, 9-5 is a joke. When I arrive at my office at 8, a number of colleagues are already there. When I leave at 6, I am not the last to go. Most of us work at night, and all of us work on the weekends. I did a survey of faculty workloads and the average workweek was 58 hours! That’s the AVERAGE. For those on a tenure-track, who don’t yet have tenure, the job is extremely stressful. They have to worry about getting excellent teaching evaluations, getting a sufficient number of publications, and not annoying senior colleagues who will vote on them (it is like having multiple bosses) for 6 years when the tenure decision will be made. The decision determines whether you will have lifetime security (yes, that does reduce stress) or will be fired with little chance of getting a comparable job. Or what about all those adjunct professors,not on a tenure track, who work for a pittance and have no chance for job security. Even those of us in the privileged ranks do not have the kind of relaxing job you suggest. We have to deal with entitled students who want us to be available 24/7 with a 10 minute turnaround on emails, the stress of dealing with students who we care deeply about facing all the problems of emerging adulthood, the difficulties of educating students whose high schools have failed them, administrators who increasingly pile on meaningless work, and difficulty colleagues (thankfully not in psych/ed). We work at night; we work on the weekends. And contrary to the implication of your article, most of us want and do publish in our fields. That means working in the summer, in a addition to all the extra hours one puts in during the academic year. It is particularly stressful for those faculty members whose research depends on obtaining grants, which has become more and more competitive and difficult.

Don’t get me wrong. I love my job, which I find endlessly interesting, meaningful, and fulfilling. I am lucky to have great colleagues. Of course, it is less stressful than working in McDonald’s, Walmart’s, and a host of other low paid jobs, including preschool teachers (who are shamefully underpaid–I know I’ve done research interviewing them). But I think you are doing professors quite a disservice but picturing us putting our feet up and eating bonbons at the end of the day. A student who comes to Mount Holyoke gets a terrific education because of the hardworking, dedicated faculty. The stress is worth it, but there is a lot of stress.

Thank you for this detailed comment and especially for sharing your survey of faculty workloads. It’s striking that your colleagues are working an average of 58 hours a week. I’m sorry I didn’t call out this comment earlier. I did update my piece to reflect the many comments I got from first-hand sources like you and I’ve written an addendum. It’s great that you love your job, but I agree that it sounds stressful with the student demands, administrative chores and long hours.

No joke: when I first read this article, I thought it was satire. Not until I scrolled down to the comments section did I come to the painful realization that it is intended to be taken seriously. As a university professor myself, Ms. Adams, here’s my advice to you: go to school for 8-10 years minimum after high school, get a Ph.D., land a tenure-track university position, and then manage to get promoted and tenured, all while maintaining the countless other responsibilities of your academic position. Then, let’s measure your stress level. At that point, I’ll extend the same courtesy to you that I give to my students when they’ve written a disastrous paper: I’ll allow you a rewrite of this article.

Thank you for helping to perpetuate the ridiculous and ignorant stereotypes that are fueling the insidious anti-education movement in this country.

Thank you for your comment. From the many comments I’m getting, I understand that professors feel that they are under a great deal of stress, and that they must juggle numerous responsibilities while trying to stay focused on publishing their research.

I agree. Publishing this and just leaving it out there with “oh, why thank you for your insightful comments on my totally baseless and ill-informed article” responses isn’t just irresponsible, it’s arrogant.

Maybe that refers to all those cushy adjunct positions? Of course, that doesn’t take into account that the adjuncts are probably working at Starbucks or Walmart over the summer to pay their bills until their teaching contract at the university starts up again in the fall…